The ground is saturated, and any rain will run off quickly and fill streets.

This is a good time to remind you of the basics:

Know your surroundings. Know what streets flood easily. If you need to get somewhere on a heavy rain day, always take the high roads.

Good message in life, too!

Always park high when heavy rain is forecast. Better safe than sorry. Know where the ditches and canals are.

When streets flood, you can not see where the street ends and the canal or ditch begins.

I’ve seen cars in ditches and canals during flood events because the street was covered with water. The truth is, you should wait for the rain to stop and water to subside before going out. The worst time to drive out is in the middle of a heavy rain event, that’s when the streets really fill with water.

It’s good to know whether the ground is saturated. That happens when we’ve had several days of moderate rain or one day of heavy rain.

If the ground is saturated, any rain that falls will run off quickly into the streets.

If there is a heavy rain for one hour on the order of one inch, and then a half-inch of rain the second hour, streets will flood.

If the drains are clogged, the water will not run off into the drains and the streets fill up. This is a good time to clean the drains.

I always hear complaints during heavy rain events, “The pumps were not on.” The water has to get to the pumps before the pumps can start pumping.

We’ve had some of our major flood events in the spring. May 3, 1978, went down in history as a top 10 weather event for the 20th century.

I remember it well.

Ten inches of rain fell with, at times, two inches an hour. The city filled up and everything stopped. Water was several feet deep in some locations. Cars could not move because streets flooded, and then the cars filled up.

May 8 and 9 in 1995 was even worse.

A cold front stalled just west of New Orleans. There was a strong jet stream out of the west and strong southerly winds pumping in warm, moist air. A trough stalled right over the city.

What happened was a 40-hour rain event where storms trained over the same areas. The first night 12.4 inches of rain fell at the airport.

The second night, the rain shifted more to the Northshore where 10-16 inches of rain fell. In Abita Springs, 15.8 inches of rain fell the second night where there was a two day total of 24.46 inches. That’s a lot of rain.

The highest total was at Necaise in Hancock County, Miss., with a total of 27.5 inches of rain. Across southeast Louisiana and south Mississippi, 44,500 homes and businesses were flooded. The damage cost: $3.1 billion.

If you live in this area, you all know about hurricane rain and storm surge.

We’ve had some major lessons going back in history -- Betsy, Camille, Katrina and Isaac to name a few.

Isaac is a good example of rain falling on top of saturated ground. Isaac stalled and dumped a lot of rain, but also acted as a pump.

Isaac pumped storm surge onshore and into the lakes. The heavy rain that fell on the Northshore and along the Mississippi coast could not flow into the lakes or into the Gulf because the onshore flow prevented the water from flowing south.

So it rained and rained, and the water flowed into the rivers, the rivers overflowed and the water just kept on going up. It was a major flood.

Know your home elevation and your risk for flooding. Every hurricane is different. It does not matter if you have never flooded before. You can not judge your possible impact by what has happened in the past, because every storm has a different path, intensity and size.

Here’s what you need to know: Turn around, don’t drown. Do not drive into flooded streets. It’s hard to know how deep the water is -- especially at night. Eighteen inches of flowing water can carry away a large SUV. Six inches of flowing water can knock over an adult. Why risk it?